Today,
Baltimore is one of the largest seaports on the
American East Coast. As the first man to sail into Chesapeake
Bay in June 1608, Captain John Smith was confronted with almost
virgin country, which he carefully documented in accurate maps.
It took half a century before the first colonists settled in
the area that now comprises the city of Baltimore. In addition
to the predominant English, the major groups among the
first settlers in Maryland consisted of Puritans fleeing
Virginia, Swedes from Delaware and New Jersey, and Germans from
Pennsylvania or the old country. Maryland was eventually
granted to the second Lord Baltimore, Cecilius
Calvert, by King Charles I in 1662. The settlement of 25
houses was named after the Lord and in 1729 was declared a
"town".

The
township grew rapidly and had almost 6000 inhabitants in 1775.
By the time it was elevated to the status of a "city" in
1796, Baltimore was home to 20,000 residents of various
ethnic stocks. It soon became the center for
Maryland's tobacco trade, which was firmly
controlled by Britain. The harbor also served as
an intermediate commercial center for crude sugar,
molasses, coffee, and citrus fruits from the West Indies before they
were forwarded to European markets.

The
early population of Baltimore was mainly English,
but the number of Irish, Swedes, Frenchmen from Canada,
and especially Germans quickly increased. Andreas Steiger, a
butcher, was the first known German colonist. The
brothers Leonard and Daniel Barnetz set up the city's
first brewery in 1748. Even before an English Protestant church was
established, there was a German one dating back to 1755. It
not only provided German church
services for the members of the
congregation, but in 1769 also established a German language
school for them.

After
the Revolutionary War, Baltimore's tobacco trade was
taken over by new settled merchants, mainly Dutchmen and
Germans. To avoid having their ships make an unprofitable
return crossing with nothing but ballast aboard, they
took on immigrants as "freight": people who hoped to
improve their lot in this new democratic, yet sparsely populated
state on the other side of the Atlantic,
unfettered by the vestiges of feudalism which still
prevailed in much of Europe.

After
the War of 1812, a noticeable wave of immigration to Baltimore
commenced, bringing Germans from Hesse, from the Palatinate, from
Bavaria and from Bohemia. They all brought their own religions
with them, their own schools and social
institutions plus German clubs, banks, insurance
companies, and newspapers. In 1850 there were already 20,000
German-born Baltimoreans; by 1890 this number had doubled.

As
in other American cities, German immigration
to Baltimore declined at the turn of the century
and after the two World Wars the Germans in Baltimore
did not regain sufficient strength to leave a distinct
mark on the city.